Report Warns of Increased Severity and Sophistication in DoS/DDoS Attacks

Service degradation is enough to interrupt business. Sixty percent of survey respondents stated they experienced service degradation due to attacks in 2013. While it might not seem as detrimental as a complete shutdown, studies show that 57 percent of online consumers will abandon a site after waiting three seconds for a page to load and 80 percent of those people will not return. For service-based organizations, this can result in immediate revenue loss.

Radware® (NASDAQ: RDWR), a leading provider of application delivery and application security solutions for virtual and cloud data centers, recently released its 2013 Global Application and Network Security Report. The annual report indicates that distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks will continue to be a serious issue in 2014 – as attackers become more agile and their tools become more sophisticated. In 2013, increasingly widespread DDoS attacks have led to detrimental service outages and service degradation, critically impacting revenue, overall customer satisfaction and brand perception. The report also reveals that attackers have become faster in defeating newly deployed mitigation tools.

Radware’s Emergency Response Team (ERT), which actively monitors and mitigates attacks in real-time, developed the report - delivering an important analysis of DoS/DDoS attacks from both an enterprise and technical perspective, and provides best practices to inform and help organizations combat network assaults. The 2013 report was compiled using data from over 300 cases handled by Radware's ERT in 2013, a vendor-neutral security industry survey conducted by the ERT, and the newly added executive survey consisting of personal interviews with 15 high-ranking security executives.

"Our report indicates that DoS/DDoS attacks have increasingly become the tool of choice for cyber-hackivists groups and will continue to wreak havoc on organizations," says Avi Chesla, chief technology officer at Radware. "Eighty-seven percent of our respondents encountered service-level issues from these style of attacks. The negative impact of a service outage is already understood, but even small instances of service degradation can have harmful, lasting effects on an organization’s brand image, customer satisfaction and ultimately its bottom line."

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